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Found in everything from space shuttles to dental fillings, composite materials have thoroughly infiltrated modern society. But their potential is still greatly untapped, offering researchers ample opportunity for discovery.

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Titanic Upgrade

Titan supercomputer receives $1 million-plus software update

Every computer needs a software update now and then, and the Titan supercomputer—which can run more than 20,000 trillion calculations per second—is no exception. A team of physicists from UTA will upgrade the Titan’s software, enabling it to support extremely data-heavy scientific applications, thanks to a $1.06 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Kaushik De, physics professor and director of the High-Energy Physics Group, says the first priority is to upgrade Titan—located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee—to manage “the huge amounts of data generated by the particle and nuclear physics experiments in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.” But the team hopes its upgrade can help researchers in other fields like advanced biology and materials science as well.

“Our unifying workload management system will help integrate the grid, supercomputers, and cloud computing to move toward a high-capacity global cyber-infrastructure that could transform scientific research around the world,” says Dr. De.

He hopes the system will improve the operational efficiencies of Titan and other supercomputers, perhaps leading to an approach that all computing facilities could run.